The Law of the Land: Life in the Nation of Laws

Well my friends, it seems that the law of the land continues to exercise its big twitching muscle. Our Supreme Court is about as obfuscating, and living a virtual contradiction, as are any of us mere mortals. In this “nation of laws,” it is now a fact that not only is a corporationa person; it now seems that police requesting someone of apparently Hispanic descent to stand and deliver his or her immigration documents is not really a case of racial profiling after all. Well, I am certainly glad we cleared that up. Yet, only a highly irritable and unforgiving god knows exactly what this Court will pronounce concerning the presidential healthcare clusterfuck. Either way, “we, the people,” stand to be screwed. OMG… Just this afternoon, the Supremes upheld the universal mandate as allowed under the law. What did they do? They simply redefined it as a tax issue; and we all know that the federal government has the right to tax us anyway they like. The interesting twist here is that this new tax will be paid to commercial insurance companies. Is this a great nation, or what? There is absolutely nothing free in this freedom loving nation.

This is where the specific gravity of the Western curriculum comes into clearer focus, its self-justifying logic, and the deep fissures of arbitrariness characterizing our institutions. The very structure of our reasoning process gives scientists, politicians, legislators, and judges the capacity to reshape our reality constantly and conveniently through redefining what is and is not the case – socially, economically, or physically. These definitions are then institutionalized through the articulation of governing laws and validating opinions meant to reflect those very same states of affairs. Such laws stand uncontested until and unless circumstances arise that put them again into question. Law – itself a convenient type of hypothesis formation intended to justify our opinions and “save the appearance” of our ever-changeable reality – shows itself to be the unseen medium in which we move, and the controlling mechanism by means of which we interact with one another in civil (i.e., post-traditional) society.

In the social realm, law provides us with a world built upon the codification of rights, obligations, duties, and responsibilities – property rights being foundational among them. Even the most profoundly personal relations between persons – the intimate activities between partners – are turned into contractual agreements concerning property rights and obligations. And as we have already witnessed, decisions concerning our own personal healthcare are already the object of legal control and contractual obligation, as we find in our managed care plans, and soon to be in our federal insurance mandate. One thing is clear. Laws are intended to protect property and those who own it. The more properties you own (real estate, capital, factories, workers, etc), the more the laws will function to your satisfaction and the protection of your properties.

And while we say there is only one legislative branch of government in the USA, the fact of the matter is that all three branches here are consumed with the articulation, execution, or adjudication of law, whether through legislative action, executive order, or judicial opinion. Legislating is what modern governments were designed to do best. And the logistical ordering of legislative processes, ties every judgment about culpability, liability, and the assignment of guilt directly to the curriculum through the causality implicit in the syllogism.

In this way, we in the civilized West (and increasingly those in the civilized East) manage things and people by explicitly binding agreement, grounded in a very formalized and unforgiving logical structure, and the codification of that calculative thinking into specific laws. Whether it is a futures’ contract in commodities, an insurance contract on the car, a service contract on that new i-phone, a mortgage contract on the house, or a publishing contract on our next book release, the issue is quintessentially about property, it’s disposition, and our rights or obligations relative to that property. Contractual arrangements are concerned with the pure application of an unrelenting logic, without regard to personal circumstances or situational concerns (that is, unless of course you are a politician, and then you get a sweetheart deal); just ask those who recently lost their homes through foreclosure. The law even has the ability to transform other persons into commodities or properties accountable and manipulable under formal contractual arrangements; for example, the employment contract or the marriage contract, to name only two.

So: when we lose the Way we find power; losing power we find goodness; losing goodness we find righteousness; losing righteousness we’re left with obedience.

Obedience to law is the dry husk of loyalty and good faith. Opinion is the barren flower of the Way, the beginning of ignorance. (Tao Te Ching #38)

And “ignorance” is as good a definition as any in describing what we now have leading us, as we limp and lurch around looking for another silver bullet to save the day.

On the other hand, in a world anchored by kinship and predicated on sharing, social and environmental relations are orchestrated through the concrete, albeit often complex, realities of consanguinity (blood) and tribal affinities (compatibility). There are no abstract legal agreements controlling relations in primal human societies. Laws and contracts are creations of the logic of the civilized world; such contracts, like written codes or laws, are unknown in the pre-civilized (pre-literate) milieu. Certainly, we find customs and myths in this world, the glue that cements and under girds primal social interaction. However, this is grounded in the realities of the daily surround, and a foundation of egalitarian relations. And just as there are no laws regulating one’s role within the social fabric; so too there is no formal hierarchy. Where kinship exists, kingship is not necessary, and laws are not required to manage the affairs of the group. Custom silently regulates the relations between and among members of the tribe.

Our civilized societies are peopled with strangers – individuals relocated and living anonymously clustered among apartment buildings and overpriced cul-de-sacs. Even the remaining “villages” we may inhabit here in the West are now large enough, by the thousands in many cases, and alien enough, to militate against knowing those with whom you struggle daily to survive. Thriving in this quaffed but treacherous urban landscape requires strict focus on the superficial, on the games that we all are forced to play just to get along and fight for the crumbs falling off the table of plenty.

Yet, for many of us, money is not the primary concern or the motivating driver. Peace, meaningful engagement, a less complicated life, these are the things to which we all look forward: to die a good death, a happy death. To be loved by those whom we love; to be missed by those whom we will miss; to be remembered in fondness by those with whom we were acquainted. To hope for anything more would be overreaching and selfish. This is already enough. But the more forcefully we lean forward into that anticipated future, a future informed by the recent memory of the historical past, and seek to navigate our way to a chosen but distant horizon, in that moment the options and the journey close-off to us. And we are lost.

43 Responses to The Law of the Land: Life in the Nation of Laws

I gotta agree with the overpopulation bomb. Now Sandy writes that “Laws and contracts are creations of the logic of the civilized world,” So that what logic is. Pretty much a not logical world that thinks it is civilized and why would any one tout a civilized world in the first place. How did that come about? I am sure religion had something to do with it. It usually does. Its us against those rotten uncivilized heathens that we need to control. Total insanity.

It really is all about the art of war. Divide and conquer and control. Those in power have learned this long ago. This is what civilization is: control. And what is it that allows that control. Fear. Fear of bodily harm real or imagined. War is deception.

Fear and control. Perfectly said. After so many years, we don’t always realize the deep roots in these 2 soils. And because we are all products of this systems, generation reinforcing generation, all levels of relationship are driven by this team. Fear…the anticipation of the future.

Don’t know that they’re necessarily “a product of,” but they’re definitely “related to.” Overpopulation is a direct result of our love for and blind faith in technology, specifically the wonders enabled by our one time only gift of fossil fuels and the wonders of dominion over nature it has thus far provided. All of which fits hand in glove with the hierarchical Judeo-Christian ethic to “go forth, be fruitful, and multiply,” and to “have dominion of nature.” Of course, the part about being a good husband/steward over all we have dominion over conveniently gets left out, but that’s to be expected.

And, of course, we have the prince of peace yesterday in Colorado telling the firefighters that they will need “some help from Mother Nature.” I think his words were tongue in cheek. He has proven over the long haul that he does not give a damn about Gaia. She is just so many resources to be mastered and abused from the seat in which he sits, whether or not he realizes it. He is a charlatan; like the others. And yes, DA, the First World religious sentiment articulated in the OT and NT really is about controlling nature; after all that is what a good husband is supposed to do to his wifely property as well, according to scripture!!

Please don’t think racial profiling takes place just in the States. It happens everywhere in all the major countries (or minor) where the population take immigration to be a “problem”, or threat to themselves and their jobs (jobs the population probably don’t want anyway!). Most of Europe is like that as far as I can see. And as for the comment that there is nothing free (regarding the insurance companies receiving the tax for health care), well, when was anything free anywhere? Except for the people who give their time and skills to good causes). Oh wait, The pharmaceutical companies will donate everything out of the goodness of their hearts, as will the doctors, nurses, manufacturers of hospital equipment etc…on down through the chain. In England it is paid for by our taxes. Good. That is a good thing. Most of us SHARE our money so EVERYONE can go see a doctor when they need it, or medicine or what have you. Oh, just saw a show last night on a group of doctors at a London hospital that travel to Vietnam and bring back children to be treated for all sorts of disorders (disorders believed to be caused by genetic abnormalities mainly by Agent Orange-sprayed during the Vietnam War. These doctors give their time and operating theatre space for free (truly free) to fix these people up. Whole teams of them. There are good people in the system. You have to look for them. And a utopia full of caring, decent people looking out for each other outside of disasters will probably never exist anywhere.
Written by an old cynic.

If there is much of an economy left by the time the mandate, I mean, tax takes effect, I will be amazed. If it does take effect, a massive increase in the gaming of the system will be sure to bankrupt us, that and the most unhealthy, entitled people in the history of the world demanding whatever “healthcare” they want. But what am I saying? We are already insolvent. This is just a smokescreen while they prepare for martial law.

I am neither obedient, nor righteous, nor do I seek power over others, and all around me I feel the cage walls of binding social control closing in. Then I step outside, into my garden, into my wild, woolly yard, the cardinals nesting in the blackberries, the wrens nesting in the elderberries, birds, bugs and butterflies all around, this sanctuary, this oasis in this sterile urban wasteland, and the Way is evident, which some can see but few emulate, and the rest make of me a target.

Well, I certainly understand your comment about finding peace at least in
your garden. Otherwise, you are twice the cynic I am, and that’s saying something!
Everyone cheer up. Maybe an asteroid will hit us yet!

I’m of the opinion that most of what we know as disease and sickness is not endemic to the human condition, but caused by the pace, the stress, and the myriad pollutants endemic to civilization. As the old shaman’s said, there’s a plant to treat every sickness. But everything about civilization is about separating us, from plants and their gifts, from the rhythms of nature, from each other. What if the whole city I live in were a tapestry of gardens, as opposed to the endless sheet of sod, asphalt and concrete, and people actually had time to tend the plants, to share with their neighbors, to explore their own gifts, instead of the incessant working somewhere else to pay for what? Like I have said in my blog, far more money I make goes to bankers, in the form of mortgage payments, than what I send to the gov to pay welfare for the poor. I’d rather not work my ass off to pay for either, but apparently I have to, if I hope to maintain a garden surrounding a house.

There are good people everywhere. But just about everyone good and bad, believes in the mythology of progress, and the legitimacy of empire, hierarchy and command and control Patriarchy. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it probably will, at least until the veil of civilization is removed, and we pass through the threshold of collapse.

Good discussions taking place over at Naked Capitalism regarding the ACA. And you and Sandy hit it right on the head. The word “TAX” is what this decision was all about. Nothing more than an explicit signal to the conservative political base that this should be a major election theme this fall, and not an issue to be legislated from the bench. ENTIRELY consistent with conservative rhetoric. Even I got caught off guard by the decision, but in retrospect, it’s hard to understand why. This one was a slam dunk from the start, as Roberts’ pretzel logic in support of the act so clearly demonstrates. You’ve gotta hand it to the Repubes, they’re ALWAYS thinking the long game, a trait the Dems seem to be entirely unable to fathom, assuming they’re not merely a wholly owned shell corporation of the Repubes in the first place.

I have described civilization on numerous occasions, so I won’t repeat it here. And, no, I don’t want to change the world. That is not my intention nor my motivation for writing.

In terms of surviving the unfolding collapse of civilization, I have already made my first tentative steps. I have a country cottage in Siberia with a garden, forests, aquifer and river at hand. I am trying to simplify my life and my reliance on complex society. But, it is a difficult task for any of us, as we have been indoctrinated over generations into a certain way of life. I do not believe there are any political, global or societal solutions. Again, I would ask you to reread any number of my posts.

I think we all need to make our own arrangements based upon what we think is unfolding. I would point you to Guy McPherson, Walking Away From Empire, as one man’s response. It is listed in my Bookshel page, and I wrote a review of it, in the Post Page earlier last year (maybe November). Best of luck, Dina

“Sometimes that shark looks right into ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn’t even seem to be livin’… until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’.” – Captain Quint – Jaws

of course you know why sharks don’t bite lawyers? professional courtesy.
laws? laws? we don’t need no stinkin’ laws, least not when it comes to those who don’t want to go along with the curriculum. declaration of war? how quaint, let’s just get a “sense of the congress”, a “resolution”, show how resolute we are. speaking of which, good link over at nature bats last concerning our latest african adventures.

on the whole subject of laws and courts, racial profiling, and mandates? most people, myself included, have thought that the law actually stood for something, that oaths were to be honored, what a hoot! where i live there’s lots of rednecks, do they hate mexicans? not really, we have lived with all types our whole lives, never give it a thought, until the construction jobs are gone. then there is the argument that americans won’t work for the wages, but i guess that’s just fine for them mexicans, huh? what a con job, and this stuff comes out of the mouths of “progressives”!!!! signs and wonders. of course identity politics trumps class solidarity, and the really weird thing? this has all grown out of supposedly left-wing politics. like i said, when i went to school, worked, played football, and served in the armed forces with people with last names like renteria, soliz, diaz, alvarez, hernandez, rodriquez, well, it truly never occurred to me they were so different, must be the way i was raised. but here’s the deal, you got these good church going folk, try to keep their kids off drugs, stay fairly peaceful considering how well armed a lot of them are, and what do they get? another day older and deeper in debt.

the ACA? jesus, where do you start? once more the self styled “progressives” have gotten four square behind the government mandating the purchase of a product from capitalist concerns, but let’s be honest, how progressive were progressives in the first place? i know the history, but come on, a mandate to buy insurance from a vaguely regulated for profit entity? well, now at least we have the proverbial foot in the door, all the dire prognostications of the rabid right are liable to come true, small businesses will dump employees off their crappy little $1500 deductible health plans, the exchanges will be flooded, and we will wind up with de facto single payer. would have been much more honest to do this all up front, it’s kinda sneaky. and here’s the bitch, there are plenty of examples of how to do it right, just look around, germany, japan, canada?

naw, can’t find a flaw in your description of the way our laws and thought processes work, i would only possibly substitute capital for property, your term is more encompassing.

but then that’s the point isn’t it? kinship, agreement, shared values, the things a tribal group would be more likely to agree upon, it’s not happening. to live peacefully you need polity, the larger the group the harder that is to accomplish. the older i get the less likely i am to say anybody is right or wrong about whatever fact or opinion they may hold to, the curse of deconstructivism, the post modern paradigm.

you won’t really find many willing to go the course, actually analyzing society strictly value free, utilizing the “police agency of the look” as baudrillard says, except our lords and masters, and their ladies, let’s not forget the ladies, at least the ones who are crocodilian enough to gain membership in the group!!!! no, the agents of force are definitely able to utilize the police agency. we will see this at the conventions, must observe the forms.

nope, it’s survival politics, always has been, as you say, since there has been enough surplus to fight about. i find myself profiling more and more, look!!!! there’s a human being, how is it going to try and screw me? old habits die hard. what i don’t like about my daily life is the constant undercurrent of violence, the threat, you can’t drive down the street and not feel it, and everybody drives so fast. in the last week i have had two people yelling and screaming at me, and it was they who were breaking the traffic laws. you would think that considering the rate of murder, assault, rape, robbery, and just general hatred that is all around we might get a clue, that we might reform our society in order to alleviate these problems, ain’t happening, no one cares to address the actual problem, the cause, but it makes to many people uncomfortable to face what we are doing to ourselves, they might not get their share, what a clusterfuck, kunstler is right, you are right.

“Men on the moon and men spinning round the earth like it might be midges round a lamp, and there’s not more attention paid to earthly law nor order no more.” the filthy old drunkie- a clockwork orange

i know, a case study, bad day at work. orwell wrote of people not having the words anymore to express their frustration, “inchoate” being the fashionable word. the term narcissistic comes to mind, npd anyone? got some. but how does one make a living?
but enuff about me, what about me? just a product of my environment. when dealing with our society (and me) it might help to think of it as being in an insane asylum, or a refugee camp filled with survivors of an atrocity, as even though we have enuff provision to be fighting about, the psychic toll is immense.

monkey see, monkey do. i have a fantastic memory, i was a sweet little kid, so nice that people hated me, i guess because they knew i was as they should be? not no more, i have absorbed the system into myself, so have others, and it has done its damage.
you get my point, pure skinnerian behavior modification. lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

I love your final paragraph. The contrasts between the worlds of contracts and kinship are drawn a bit starkly, perhaps, but the reminder about what really ought to mean the most to us and the modestly with which we pursue it is a very satisfying statement.

Like some others here, the SCOTUS ruling caught me by surprise. Although “Chief Justice Roberts has a background in health care law, “ I mused. “Maybe that fueled his decision.” Once the partisan scrambling started–our 2 Republican senators among the many calling for the repeal of the law–the whole thing came into focus: None of this is about providing true service to the needy in this country. It’s all about setting of battle lines for the election. “ What was I thinking?

Laws are substitutes for personal responsibility in a culture so disconnected that our value of a greater good has been uprooted. In my field of public education, hierarchy regularly trumps community. Control is paramount. The blatancy of fear and control rivals the outrageous lies of political and religious leaders: A principal who says we must ‘induct students into the our way” and a superintendent who tells us that we are a “family with fierce loyalty.” Read that as blind obedience, for questioning will be punished.

The layers of laws that infiltrate all aspects of our lives are like the coils of a constrictor, pulled tighter each time we exhale. (Though to be fair, the anaconda doesn’t try to persuade you that what’s happening is in your best interest.). My latest measure of where I need to be and with whom is how much can I breathe. There is no balance any more. Now is now, and we must live as fully as we can there. I’m working on the idea of a personal anarchy. Sometimes it starts a conversation that dares go to what matters. Sometimes it’s a book that hits you with its truth like a cold stone wall. Anything that can touch us enough that we say, “Yes. The time is now.”

All adaptive systems are governed by laws. The cells in your body are governed by laws too, encoded in DNA. How else could they form a cooperative meat and plant eating system? Not by being selfish little cancers. How else could you humans in your evolved civilization hope to hunt large animals, enslave the soils and devour fossil fuels without employing the utmost cooperation and specialization? Your brains have evolved to enable the current feeding frenzy with just the right mix of selfishness and cooperation. You’re just another evolved iteration of complexity, feeding your organization with fossil fuels. Too bad things are looking rather linear. I suppose you could try to send technological spore to some distant hydrocarbon rich planet, but what for? Why not just do what all unconscious beasts do when they’ve eaten their last meal. Expire slowly. The society and the laws that define it will dissipate and without an energy gradient to devour, so will man’s need for technology and the scientific learning that accompanies it.

Perhaps we could become a relatively immobile plant-like society and feed upon solar energy and wind energy. But I can’t think of any predatory animal that has made such an evolutionary leap in the direction of less complexity and lived to tell about it

Anyway, good luck as society’s laws enable it to eat more and more of its own flesh to keep itself alive and prevent its constituents from abandoning their failing domicile. Here’s to spending more time in the garden, hope they don’t end up outlawing it or taxing it.

I think you’re conflating the meanings of the word law. I also think it’s important to distinguish between natural and human systems and avoid applying interpretations of natural systems to human-created ones that do not necessarily follow the same rules.
In the natural sciences,laws describe observations of a natural occurrence : “a phenomenon of nature that has been proven to invariably occur whenever certain conditions exist or are met.” It also implies causality. They tend to be consistent planet-wide, not subject to change, and affect all constituents in an unbiased fashion. Human laws vary greatly geographically, temporally and in scale, and can most certainly be applied with bias.
There are certainly hypotheses of what forces led humans to develop cooperation to hunt large game and manipulate land bases (After Eden by Kirkpatrick Sale, and The Social Conquest of Earth by E.O. Wilson) that eventually and perhaps inevitably, brought humans to where we find ourselves today, and how those changes radically altered human self-perception.
But maybe I’m missing your point.

The temporal and spatial relationships between the constituent parts of a body are not random. DNA not only codes for protein tools, it defines the relationship and specialization of cells. Human societies play by the same types of system rules and the foundation for technological society has been the successful evolution of the brain to allow learning, cooperation, tool building and communication. The rules our societies must play by are very little different from the rules the cells of our bodies must play by. We have been pressed into an energy processing system that will likely not stop its insanity until its primary and only meal, fossil fuel, is used up. Meanwhile in this roiling vat of yeast, the metabolism continues unabated and the toxic waste accumulates around us.

Just as a geographicly limited bacterium may enjoy a sudden large bounty of resources (such as the petri dish medium) so to is our current society – unlike our bacteria model however we can see the impending limits to our growth (at least some of us at the early stages of the limits, more as the limits get closer), and we can do something similar to the bacterial ‘Sporulation’ (the formation of nearly dormant forms of bacteria. In a limited number of bacteria, spores can preserve the genetic material of the bacteria) we to can form small communities set up to be largely self sufficent and containing the genetic material of our science and culture through the coming population crash and dark ages.
When we again discover some source of energy or growth we will be able to resume growth hopefully at a more modest level and in a manner that eventually allows us to leave our limited petri-dish.

“I see the world as A and want A1, you see the world as B and want B1, so what is the world then “Objectively Speaking” ? What is the correct politics or the correct thing to desire or the correct way the “World Should Be” or how it should “Be Seen” ? None, there isn’t any, it is all a simple tug of war, a fight amongst contrasting, but equally arbitrary and Subjective views and Politics of an imaginary Common World which doesn’t exist at all, since the world is only a stage where contrasting will powers execute their fight and conflict according to contrasting “Imaginary Mental Models” of how the world should be according to any number of ideologies, designs, desires, subjective gains, simple egostical and selfish gains, or as opposed general “common good” gains, or gains according to what is right for everyone, when everyone is different and contrasting, nay, both contrasting and collabortaing in a complex, tangled web of incoherencies, etc. It is all Subjective and only Subjectivity exists.”

is this really the way you have been thinking? reason i ask is it mirrors my own as i try to understand what is going on with the world. the question becomes one of whether any rational position can be defended or simply reflects the point of view or prejudice of the observer.

Excellent blog! I agree with pretty much everything you stated and also javacat’s and others’ comments. I am astounded at how few people in ‘der heimat’ here know how far we are on the way to a complete and completely fascist totalitarian state. To talk to folks one would think the 2010s are the result of normal processes working in favor of everyone’s best interests. sometimes I feel as if I am living in a 3 dimensional cartoon:-) I hope you are doing well and again I enjoy reading your blog – hope to be back soon!